so i’ve been meaning to make a post about wyll for a while now, and now is the time (lol). but i’ve been thinking and talking to friends about the lack of content wyll has in bg3, and it’s something that i think i noticed even when playing with early access. but the full game release really puts a giant spotlight on the content disparities between the main companions and even various npcs.
i don’t know if i want to fully list every single spot where wyll clearly lacks in content because i find that it’s incredibly obvious. but the few things i do want to mention are his romance/sex scene and his story line and beats being about practically everyone else. and i know that the second one is super vague and encompassing, but that’s the core of the issue. larian studios “rework” of wyll’s story line did nothing to fix it and, quite possibly, made it worse.
since i only had access to act 1 during early access, i can’t speak to act 2 and 3. but even the changes in act 1 are apparent. while i do think some of the changes larian made were good (especially changing wyll from being incredibly racist towards goblins to not), but most of the changes were just cutting content.
and then there's what was added - mizora changing wyll’s race and appearance against his will because he saved karlach. i feel people have talked about this trope around poc and black people before when talking about disney’s the princess and the frog or brother bear, and that is something that has been discussed as openly racist (here’s a mic article talking about this concept).
but beyond this, that scene isn’t really about wyll. it’s about karlach, if you really think about it. wyll is being punished because of his decision (which isn’t even really his decision because your tav makes the real decision) to save her. and this sidelining of wyll is constant throughout his story line. saving his dad (multiple times) gets sidelined with ketheric or saving the gondians, finding ansur on behalf of his ulder gets overshadowed by the emperor and ansur relationship, and so much more. there’s also the fact that to learn anything about his mom, you need to kill his dad. and don’t get me wrong, i hate ulder ravengard with a fucking passion, but i wouldn’t purposely kill him because it makes wyll hate you. to make that aspect worse, wyll isn’t even the one to tell you the lore surrounding his mom, it’s just flavor text from ulder’s sword.
there’s definitely more to say about how larian studios treats wyll’s story line, but i do want to talk about his romance story line. just like his story line, wyll’s romance is so much less than any of the other companions or even npcs. wyll has a sex scene, but it’s a fade to black with no voice over, which is nothing compared to one of the only other fade to black sex scenes: the drow twins. the drow twins have a number of sex scene options, all of which have voice overs. wyll, one of the 6 main companions, doesn’t even get this.
and i think this all leads back to larian studios not wanting to admit that they’re racist. wyll has consistently gotten nothing, even after release with all of these updates and patches. like, let’s be real here, the reason wyll has gotten nothing is not only because of the fans or data points, it’s because larian studios is racist. it’s them, seemingly, not being aware that the fantasy genre is steeped in racism because they don’t need to think about racism because they’re european, they’re not racist because they’re not american.
i don’t even know what i want to happen with this post. i guess i just wanted to open up this discussion and maybe remind people that larian studios is not infallible.
also! i feel like i need to mention that i love wyll. he is genuinely one of my favorite characters in bg3, i want more content for him. but we need to be real about why that content isn't already in the game.
